Daniel Amyot

University of Ottawa · School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

A model family is a set of related models in a given language, with commonalities and variabilities that result from evolution of models over time and/or variation over intended usage (the spatial dimension). As the family size increases, it becomes cumbersome to analyze models individually. One solution is to represent a family using one global mo...

Telehealth can provide an effective support to older persons wanting to maintain their autonomy while requiring health care services. However, older patients often stop adhering to their telehealth care plans for different reasons including usability and diminished abilities. This issue is driven in part by the use of generic telehealth services th...

Legal contracts specify the terms and conditions—in essence, requirements—that apply to business transactions. This paper proposes a formal specification language for legal contracts, called Symboleo, where contracts consist of collections of obligations and powers that define a legal contract’s compliant executions. Symboleo offers execution time...

Smart contracts (SCs) are software systems that monitor and control the execution of legal contracts to ensure compliance with the contracts' terms and conditions. They often exploit Internet-of-Things technologies to support their monitoring functions, and blockchain technology to ensure the integrity of their data. Ethereum and business blockchai...

Legal contracts specify requirements for business transactions. As any other requirements specification, contracts may contain errors and violate properties expected by contracting parties. Symboleo was recently proposed as a formal specification language for legal contracts. This paper presents SymboleoPC, a tool for analyzing Symboleo contracts u...

Goal models are commonly used requirements engineering artefacts that capture stakeholder requirements and their inter-relationships in a way that supports reasoning about their satisfaction, trade-off analysis, and decision making. However, when there is uncertainty in the data used as evidence to evaluate goal models, it is crucial to understand...

Context: Financial Technology (FinTech) systems, especially those involving custody of digital assets such as cryptocurrencies, are quickly emerging as a new class of software systems with associated high risks. So far, incidents involving such systems have costed billions of dollars. Problem: Providing regulators and insurers with certification ca...

Socio-cyber-physical systems (SCPSs) are cyber-physical systems with social concerns. Many emerging SCPSs, often qualified as “smart”, need such concerns to be addressed not only at design time but also at runtime, often by adapting dynamically to surrounding contexts, to keep providing optimal value to users. A comprehensive requirements and desig...

Process mining (PM) exploits event logs to obtain meaningful information about the processes that produced them. As the number of applications developed on cloud infrastructures is increasing, it becomes important to study and discover their underlying processes. However, many current PM technologies face challenges in dealing with complex and larg...

Purpose: Process mining aims to construct, from event logs, process maps that can help discover, automate, improve, and monitor organizational processes. Robotic process automation (RPA) uses software robots to perform some tasks usually executed by humans. It is usually difficult to determine what processes and steps to automate, especially with R...

Goal modelling aims to capture stakeholder and system goals, together with social, intentional, and structural relationships, in a way that supports trade-off analysis and decision making. Goal models and business process models provide complementary and synergetic views of a system, which lead to a more complete understanding of what exists and a...

Socio-cyber-physical systems (SCPSs) are cyber-physical systems with social concerns. Many emerging SCPSs, often qualified as “smart”, need such concerns to be addressed not only at design time but also at runtime, often by adapting dynamically to surrounding contexts, to keep providing optimal value to users. A comprehensive requirements and desig...

Background: Socio-cyber-physical systems (SCPSs) are a type of cyber-physical systems with social concerns. Many SCPSs, such as smart homes, must be able to adapt to reach an optimal symbiosis with users and their contexts. The Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is frequently used to specify ordinary CPSs, whereas goal modeling is a requirements eng...

Regulators are under constant pressure to demonstrate if and how the regulations they administer, which impose many requirements on various systems and processes, achieve intended societal outcomes. Traditionally, regulators have relied on impact assessments, risk analysis, and cost–benefit analysis to assess compliance with regulations. These meth...

The successful implementation of a Computerized Provider Order Entry (CPOE) system is a challenging process for any healthcare organization. It requires a dramatic change not only to the way the care is provided but also to the way clinicians work. Because of the required change complexity, organizations must consider key factors of clinicians’ acc...

Goal-oriented requirements engineering aims to capture desired goals and strategies of relevant stakeholders during early requirements engineering stages, using goal models. Goal-oriented modeling techniques support the analysis of system requirements (especially non-functional ones) from an operationalization perspective, through the evaluation of...

Many people visit an emergency department immediately after experiencing some unusual symptoms, without any regard to the scale of acuity of their condition. Some of these visits are unnecessary and lead to overcrowded emergency departments, increased wait times, and overutilization of scarce healthcare resources. At the other end of the spectrum,...

Well-Being, Aging, and Health (WBAH) are important aspects of life that affect us all. The requirements for WBAH systems have also become a topic of common interest for researchers from different disciplines. This is unsurprising, given that health-related expenses often represent about 10% of a country's gross domestic product, according to the Wo...

Social dependance relationships were used in the i* requirements modelling language to represent dependencies among social actors. We study the evolution of the notion of social dependency into that of commitment in the Azzurra specification language for business processes, and then into the notions of obligation and power in the Symboleo specifica...

Through transactive energy (TE) platforms, prosumers can enter into a contractual agreement with an Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) to buy and sell energy. Accordingly, the TE contract holders are liable for contractual violations. Manual compliance checking of such transactions is infeasible due to large number of market rules as we...

A goal model family is a set of related goal models that conform to the same metamodel, with commonalities and variabilities between models. Such families stem from the evolution of initial models into several versions over time and/or the variation of models over the space dimension (e.g., products). In contexts where there are several versions/va...

Legal contracts specify obligations and powers among legal subjects, involve assets, and are subject to quality constraints. Smart contracts are software systems that monitor the execution of contracts to ensure compliance. As a starting point for developing software engineering concepts, tools, and techniques for smart contracts, we have proposed...

A renewed understanding of service as a process of resource application and integration, rather than as digital or physical products, shifts the focus of service engineering to the value-creating relationships among entities within complex socio-technical service systems. This understanding is based on Service-Dominant Logic (S-D Logic), a recogniz...

Legal contracts specify the terms and conditions (in essence, requirements) that apply to business transactions. Smart contracts are software systems that monitor and control the execution of contracts to ensure compliance. This paper proposes a formal specification language for contracts, called Symboleo, where contracts consist of collections of...

This article introduces a conceptual reference framework – the Models and Data (MODA) framework – to support a data-centric and model-driven approach for the integration of heterogeneous models and their respective data for the entire life-cycle of socio-technical systems. A pre-print version is available at https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02612087

Process mining helps infer valuable insights about business processes using event logs, whereas goal modeling focuses on the representation and analysis of competing goals of stakeholders and systems. Although there are clear benefits in mining the goals of existing processes, goal-oriented approaches that consider logs during model construction ar...

Background and purpose: Teamwork has become a modus operandi in healthcare and delivery of patient care by an interdisciplinary healthcare team (IHT) is now a prevailing modality of care. We argue that a formal and automated support framework is needed for an IHT to properly leverage information technology resources. Such a framework should allow...

Background: Despite the potential benefits of health information exchange (HIE) and the two decades of efforts from the Canadian and the American governments to promote health exchange projects, failures far outnumber successes. Objective: To better understand the barriers influencing the adoption and implementation of inter-organization HIE system...

Background: Because of the important role of hospital emergency departments (EDs) in providing urgent care, EDs face a constantly large demand that often results in long wait times. Objective: To review and analyze the existing literature in ED simulation modeling and its contribution in reducing patient wait time. Methods: A literature review was...

Much research is ongoing to assess and improve compliance to laws and regulations. As this domain continues to grow and mature, and with more modelling methods introduced to support compliance tasks, important questions need to be asked. What exactly are these methods used for? Where have they been applied? What benefits do they offer? This paper e...

Many Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) today are self-adaptive, in order to handle frequent changes in environmental conditions and requirements. In CPSs, goal-based reasoning is often used to include stakeholder and social concerns in decision making during design and runtime adaptation activities. To better support some of these activities, arithmeti...

For a given modeling language, a model family is a set of related models, with commonalities and variabilities among family members, that results from the variation/evolution of models over the space and time dimensions. With large model families, the analysis of individual models becomes cumbersome and inefficient. This paper proposes union models...

Integrating new technology in a business environment raises many challenges such as ensuring that this technology meets stakeholder requirements and contributes to organizational goals. However, before analyzing the impact of technology on requirements and goals, goal models of the current context and of the proposed technology should be merged to...

Process mining uses event log data to discover processes, hence enabling multiple requirements elicitation activities. As the number of applications deployed on a cloud infrastructure is increasing, it becomes important to understand their processes and the ways these existing systems are actually used. However, the cloud brings new challenges to p...

Requirements specification is a crucial stage in many software development life cycles. As requirements specifications evolve, they often become more complex. The development of methods to assist the comprehension and maintenance of requirements specifications has gained much attention in the past 20 years. However, there is much room for improveme...

Requirements and their models often evolve to reflect changing needs, technologies, and regulations. The decision to implement proposed changes to requirements models relies on means to capture and analyze the potential impact of such changes. The User Requirements Notation (URN) is a standardized requirements modeling language that incorporates tw...

Process mining practices are mainly activity-oriented and they seldom consider the (often conflicting) goals of stakeholders. Involving goal-related factors, as often done in requirements engineering, can improve the rationality and interpretability of mined models and lead to better opportunities to satisfy stakeholders. This paper proposes a new...

As researchers and teachers and practitioners, we “software types” excel at multitasking. This, in part, led us to ask the question: Can one attend a software engineering conference and do something good for society? We found the answer to be a resounding yes. In this article, we present our first experience of running RE Cares, a conference colloc...

Goal models are used to support early requirements engineering activities by capturing system and stakeholder objectives and their links, and by enabling what-if and trade-off analysis in a decision-making context. They are also increasingly used in system monitoring and self-adaptation contexts. Yet, automatically converting goal models to code fo...

Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) are business-to-busi-ness services that are characterized as being knowledge intensive, relying on ex-pert employees, and providing knowledge-based solutions to customers. As a context for service design, KIBS bring unique challenges regarding the need to communicate about value cocreation among companie...

Interdisciplinary healthcare teams (IHTs) are involved in clinical processes composed of tasks requiring specific capabilities from different disciplines, often executed at different times. Although some hospitals use Business Process Management (BPM) suites to support their clinical activities, these tools are often unable to support the dynamic a...

The importance and usefulness of requirements engineering (RE) techniques (elicitation, analysis, modeling, change management, etc.) have been proven oftentimes in domains such as telecommunications and cybersystems. However, in healthcare, such practices, beyond elicitation, are immature. The introduction of changes to existing healthcare processe...

Regulations are introduced by governments to ensure the well-being, safety, and other societal needs of citizens and enterprises. Governments also create programs aiming to improve awareness about and compliance with regulations. Goal models have been used in the past to conceptualize regulations and to measure compliance assessments. However, regu...

Data are supposed to be used in the service of accomplishing business goals. This chapter intro-duces a framework that establishes links between an organization's business goals and its information system (IS). The framework relies on the User Requirements Notation (URN) and jUCMNav, a free Eclipse-based tool for analyzing and managing URN models,...

The SDL Forum Society exists since the early 1990’s and has led the organization of numerous conferences and workshops over the years. This paper performs a citation analysis of 491 papers published in 22 SDL/SAM proceedings published between 1991 and 2016 in order to assess the impact of these events on academic research. Through the use of common...

Background: Because of the important role of hospital emergency departments (EDs) in providing urgent care, EDs face a constantly large demand that often results in long wait times. Objective: To review and analyze the existing literature in ED simulation modeling and its contribution in reducing patient wait time. Methods: A literature review was...

Background: Hospitals need to accurately manage mobile devices (e.g., intravenous pumps) associated to their patients and health providers to ensure patient safety. Some hospitals have already invested substantially in real-time location system (RTLS) technology, a specific type of Internet of Things (IoT) application for indoor positioning, to man...

The healthcare sector faces important challenges in evaluating and improving its services to meet desired targets, patient needs, and government requirements. In particular, the introduction of a new process or information system in healthcare is a challenging task, especially in the absence of mature practices for requirements engineering and proc...

Context: In Canada, the justice system suffers from performance and efficiency issues as indicated by long wait time before trial. Actors in the justice system are seeking solutions involving emerging information technology. Problem: There is need to guide the selection of appropriate combinations of technologies supporting or improving justice sys...

A virtual patient navigator is a web/mobile application that helps patients with lung cancer diagnosis reduce their anxiety and uncertainties. In particular, lung cancer patients easily become overwhelmed when having to manage information overload, many appointments with different instructions and locations, and recommendations on how to improve th...

Regulations constitute a rich source of requirements for software systems, especially so for information systems that handle sensitive data. However, there has been little attention paid to regulators and their requirements for managing the regulatory lifecycle. This paper presents a study of the state-of-practice for regulators in Canada by examin...

Predictive analytics can provide valuable support to the effective management of pathology facilities. The introduction of new tests and technologies in anatomical pathology will increase the volume of specimens to be processed, as well as the complexity of pathology processes. In order for predictive analytics to address managerial challenges asso...

Background: Despite the potential benefits of health information exchange (HIE) and the two decades of efforts from the Canadian and the American governments to promote health exchange projects, failures far outnumber successes. Objective: To better understand the barriers influencing the adoption and implementation of inter-organization HIE system...

The User Requirements Notation (URN) is a standard modeling language that includes two complementary views, one for goals with the Goal-oriented Requirement Language (GRL) and one for scenarios/processes with Use Case Maps (UCM). The URN standard, however, does not provide means of checking consistency between the GRL and UCM views, leading to mode...